**Accurate Deep Model for Electricity Consumption Forecasting Using Multi-Channel and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion CNN–LSTM**

### **Xiaorui Shao, Chang-Soo Kim \* and Palash Sontakke**

Department of Information Systems, Pukyong National University, Busan 608737, Korea; shaoxiaoruil@pukyong.ac.kr (X.S.); palashsntkk65@gmail.com (P.S.)

**\*** Correspondence: cskim@pknu.ac.kr

Received: 13 March 2020; Accepted: 10 April 2020; Published: 12 April 2020

**Abstract:** Electricity consumption forecasting is a vital task for smart grid building regarding the supply and demand of electric power. Many pieces of research focused on the factors of weather, holidays, and temperatures for electricity forecasting that requires to collect those data by using kinds of sensors, which raises the cost of time and resources. Besides, most of the existing methods only focused on one or two types of forecasts, which cannot satisfy the actual needs of decision-making. This paper proposes a novel hybrid deep model for multiple forecasts by combining Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) algorithm without additional sensor data, and also considers the corresponding statistics. Di fferent from the conventional stacked CNN–LSTM, in the proposed hybrid model, CNN and LSTM extracted features in parallel, which can obtain more robust features with less loss of original information. Chiefly, CNN extracts multi-scale robust features by various filters at three levels and wide convolution technology. LSTM extracts the features which think about the impact of di fferent time-steps. The features extracted by CNN and LSTM are combined with six statistical components as comprehensive features. Therefore, comprehensive features are the fusion of multi-scale, multi-domain (time and statistic domain) and robust due to the utilization of wide convolution technology. We validate the e ffectiveness of the proposed method on three natural subsets associated with electricity consumption. The comparative study shows the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed hybrid deep model with good robustness for very short-term, short-term, medium-term, and long-term electricity consumption forecasting.

**Keywords:** smart grid; electricity forecasting; CNN–LSTM; very short-term forecasting (VSTF); short-term forecasting (STF); medium-term forecasting (MTF); long-term forecasting (LTF)
